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“Maybe that will turn out to be a mistake, but it is a risk calculated relative to the potential reward and achievement of the vision,” he says.

Linda Cheung gave up her high-flying COO role at to co-found social CRM and services business CubeSocial. As a youngster she had watched her father run his own business, so an entrepreneurial spirit was in part inevitable; but the risk?

She says: “My inner business sense tells me that risk is not a negative thing. Nor is it necessarily a positive thing, but more a challenge. Risk and reward have to be seen as a balance.

“I knew that I could forego earning an income for a period of time, and our focus during start up was on seeing connections, joining the dots, identifying the opportunities more than the risk. It is about seeing the glass as half full.”

She says: “Most people thought I was crazy to move AC PowerCoaching from London to Bonn last year. It was successful, in an ideal location, with great contacts and opportunities. To me it was the perfect time to start disrupting the European market.”

Cserhati has also discovered that German attitudes to business risk differ from those in the US or UK. For example, German entrepreneurs have a tendency to be cautious about credit. The majority of firms are in the German ‘Mittelstand’ or SME sector, which contributes over half of total economic output - and finances most of its investment from its own equity.

“From my experience, German entrepreneurs are extremely innovative, but culturally more conservative about taking risk, compared to those in other countries. That could explain why around 95% of all German firms are family-owned, and largely managed by their owner,” she says.

And that raises the issue of collective attitudes to risk creating barriers to innovation. As serial entrepreneur and chairman of B1G1Paul Dunn points out, the word 'entrepreneur' comes from the French word 'entreprendre', meaning to undertake.

“For me that simply means 'undertaking' things that we believe can be done to create something magical. And you risk everything to get it done, but you never see it as risky; that's for others,” he says.

And therein lies the challenge. As the business grows, teams are built, and collectively don't want to take the 'risk' of doing new stuff. It is one of the reasons why innovation can and does decline in larger companies. And perhaps why increasingly we see companies rewarding 'failure' so that people are encouraged at every step to risk it all.

Dunn adds: “To quote Einstein; ‘Unless at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.’ Long may we entrepreneurs embrace and act on that thought.”